Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  In The Republic, Plato’s description of an ideal polis, he described the process of philosophical initiation in his famous allegory of the cave.62 He imagined a group of men who had been chained up all their lives in a cave; turned away from the sunlight, they could see only shadows of objects in the outside world cast on the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition. We are so inured to our deprived vision that, like the prisoners, we assume that the ephemeral shadows we see are the true reality. If the prisoners were taken into the upper world, they would be bewildered and dazzled by its light, brilliance, and vibrancy; they would find it too much and would want to go back to their twilight existence. So they must be initiated gradually into this new mode of being. The sunlight was a symbol of the Good, the highest of the forms, source of knowledge and existence. The Good lay beyond anything we could experience in ordinary life. But at the end of a long apprenticeship, enlightened souls would be able to bask in its light. They would want to linger in the upper world, but had a duty to go back to the cave and enlighten their companions. They would be able to assess the problems of their shadowy world far more clearly now, but they would get no credit for it. Their former companions would probably laugh at them. They might even turn on their liberators and kill them—just, Plato implied, as the Athenians had executed Socrates. Toward the end of Plato’s life, as the political situation in Athens deteriorated, his vision became more elitist and hard-line. In The Laws, his last work, which described another utopian republic, he even introduced an inquisitorial mechanism to enforce a theological orthodoxy that took precedence over ethical behavior. The first duty of the state was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and then to live accordingly, well or not well.”63 This was an entirely new development, alien to both ancient religion and philosophy.64 A “nocturnal council” must supervise the thinking of the citizens, who were required to submit to three articles of faith: that the gods existed, that they cared for human beings, and that they could not be influenced by sacrifice and worship. A convicted atheist was allowed five years to recant, but if he persisted in his heresy, he would be executed.65 It is sobering to note that the inquisitorial methods that the Enlightenment philosophes castigated in the revealed religions made an early appearance in the Greek rational tradition they so much admired.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Moses may have stood in the place where God was, but he had no lucid vision of the divine. 48 The biblical writers made it clear that the kavod of Yahweh was not God himself; it was, as it were, a mere afterglow of God’s presence on earth, essentially and crucially separate from the divine reality itself, which would always be beyond human ken. The Israelites who had been deported to Babylon in 597 were not badly treated. They lived together in communities in the capital or in new settlements beside the canal and were allowed a degree of autonomy. But they were shocked, bewildered, and angry. Some wanted to pay the Babylonians back in kind and dreamed of dashing their children’s heads against a rock. 49 Others felt that Yahweh had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marduk and was no longer worthy of their loyalty. How could they possibly worship a god who had no cult and no temple? 50 But five years after his deportation, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision of Yahweh’s “glory” beside the Chebar Canal. 51 It was a bewildering theophany, since it was impossible to make out anything clearly in the stormy obscurity of thunder, lightning, smoke, and wind. The trauma of exile had smashed the neat, rationalistic God of the Deuteronomists. Ezekiel’s vision left him stunned for a whole week. But one thing seemed clear. God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles. Henceforth they must live as though the “glory” previously enshrined in the temple was indeed in their midst. But how could they do this? A small circle of exiled priests began to construct an answer, reinterpreting old symbols and stories to build an entirely new spirituality. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code (a miscellaneous collection of seventh-century laws) 52 and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence. 53 With these and other ancient oral traditions, P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement. P also added material to the JED narrative, so that it became a story of one tragic migration after another: the expulsion from Eden, the wanderings of Cain, the dispersal of humanity after the rebellion at Babel, the departure of Abraham from Mesopotamia, the tribes’ flight to Egypt, and the forty years in the wilderness.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  These are the worst possible things for a reader to become. You must assume that we, your readers, are bright and attentive, even if we have lost the tiniest bit of ground in the last few years. So we are going to catch you if you try to fake it. If you realize that you have done this, you need to stop and look at your characters again. You’ve got to go into these people, and since you don’t know them, this means that you need to go into you, wonderful you, who has so many problems and idiosyncrasies—you, who will be able to figure out what is true for these people and hence, what they would or would not do in a given situation. I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine , who was discussing rewriting: “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times. I would have all these wonderful shiny bulbs, each self-contained with nothing to hang them on. But I would stay with the characters, caring for them, getting to know them better and better, suiting up each morning and working as hard as I could, and somehow, mysteriously, I would come to know what their story was. Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. Some writers claim to know what the climax is early on, well before they get anywhere near it. The climax is that major event, usually toward the end, that brings all the tunes you have been playing so far into one major chord, after which at least one of your people is profoundly changed. If someone isn’t changed, then what is the point of your story? For the climax, there must be a killing or a healing or a domination. It can be a real killing, a murder, or it can be a killing of the spirit, or of something terrible inside one’s soul, or it can be a killing of a deadness within, after which the person becomes alive again. The healing may be about union, reclamation, the rescue of a fragile prize. But whatever happens, we need to feel that it was inevitable, that even though we may be amazed, it feels absolutely right, that of course things would come to this, of course they would shake down in this way.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In his own distinctive way, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) expressed a similar spirit, and was skeptical of any human attempt to attain absolute truth. In the famous “Apology of Raymond Sebond,” written, tongue-in-cheek, largely to please his father, Montaigne had marveled at Sebond’s intellectual confidence. This sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher had argued that we could derive all the information we required about God, salvation, and human life from a study of the natural world. But for Montaigne, reason was so blind and lame that nothing was certain or even probable. If an argument was sufficiently attractive, human beings could be persuaded to believe almost anything. But, far from being cast down by this unknowing, Montaigne was able to live quite happily with this modest assessment of the human intellect and seemed to enjoy the diversity and complexity of early modern life. Like the Renaissance humanists, he had no wish to pass judgment on a world that was daily becoming more difficult to assess. He regarded himself as a loyal Catholic but, in light of the new discoveries that constantly revealed the limits of human understanding, judged the attempt to impose any kind of orthodoxy as arrogant, futile, and dishonest. It would be a mistake to imagine that the entire population absorbed the new ideas instantaneously. The vast majority probably felt obscurely perplexed at the sudden fragmentation of Christendom without any clear understanding of what was going on. For at least two hundred years, old mental habits of thought persisted, sometimes jostling uneasily with the new values, and we can see this at work even in the scientific revolution. In 1530, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473— 1543), the Polish-born canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg in Prussia, completed De revolutionibus, a thesis that argued that the sun was the center of the universe. A typical Renaissance man, Copernicus had studied mathematics, optics, and perspective at Krakow, canon law in Bologna, and medicine at Padua and had lectured on astronomy in Rome. In Frauenberg, working at different times as a church administrator, bailiff, military governor, judge, and physician, he had continued his study of the stars. Copernicus knew that most of the population would find the idea of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe impossible either to understand or to accept, so he did not publish his treatise but circulated the manuscript privately. Nevertheless, De revolutionibus was widely read in both Catholic and Protestant countries and inspired a good deal of interest.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Where the very earliest accounts suggest that Moses had actually seen God on Mount Sinai,46 later authors would declare this to be impossible. When Moses begged to see Yahweh’s “glory” (kavod), Yahweh told him that no mere mortal could look upon the holiness of God and live.47 In a scene that would become emblematic, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God, a thick cloud and a blanket of impenetrable smoke hung over the summit. There was thunder and lightning and what sounded like deafening trumpet blasts. Moses may have stood in the place where God was, but he had no lucid vision of the divine.48 The biblical writers made it clear that the kavod of Yahweh was not God himself; it was, as it were, a mere afterglow of God’s presence on earth, essentially and crucially separate from the divine reality itself, which would always be beyond human ken. The Israelites who had been deported to Babylon in 597 were not badly treated. They lived together in communities in the capital or in new settlements beside the canal and were allowed a degree of autonomy. But they were shocked, bewildered, and angry. Some wanted to pay the Babylonians back in kind and dreamed of dashing their children’s heads against a rock.49 Others felt that Yahweh had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marduk and was no longer worthy of their loyalty. How could they possibly worship a god who had no cult and no temple?50 But five years after his deportation, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision of Yahweh’s “glory” beside the Chebar Canal.51 It was a bewildering theophany, since it was impossible to make out anything clearly in the stormy obscurity of thunder, lightning, smoke, and wind. The trauma of exile had smashed the neat, rationalistic God of the Deuteronomists. Ezekiel’s vision left him stunned for a whole week. But one thing seemed clear. God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles. Henceforth they must live as though the “glory” previously enshrined in the temple was indeed in their midst.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  survived. She makes her way across the room to Sharkey. She hasn’t seen him since Lamb’s fiftieth. There’s a woman at his side with a small child clinging to her back like a koala. He introduces her to Vix as Wren, and the child as her daughter, Natasha. Wren has a hair wrap and wears a long Indian print skirt. Is this a romantic relationship? Does Sharkey have a woman in his life? You might as well marry into it, Victoria. What about the brother? She feels like laughing, either that or crying, but she’s her mother’s daughter. She doesn’t wash her linen in public. Sharkey hugs Vix carefully, bending his body so that nothing of importance touches her and vice versa. “Are you okay?” he asks, and she understands that his question has nothing to do with her health. “I’m fine, really ...” she tells him, helping herself to a second glass of champagne. “Good. That’s good.” He moved back east after he got his Ph.D. and is a post doc in the artificial intelligence program at M.I.T. “Daniel and Gus are here,” he says, nodding in their direction. Vix follows his gaze and there they are. The Chicago Boys together again. She’s Alice, fallen down the rabbit hole. Her whole history is connected to the guests at this party. Daniel is tall and slim, with thinning hair, impeccably dressed in Polo Sport, and wearing that same bored expression as the day she met him. He practices law now, with his father’s firm in Chicago. Vix knows that Abby has some unspoken wish for the two of them to wind up together. She wonders if Daniel knows it, too. Gus is a big man with a thick neck, broad shoulders, dark hair. Vix hasn’t seen him since the summer she walked out on Caitlin, eight years ago. She wades through the sea of T-shirts, Caitlin’s and Bru’s faces smiling at her from all directions, and takes The Chicago Boys by surprise. “Cough Drop!” Gus gives her a tight hug. Unlike Sharkey, he has no fear of pressing his body close to hers or of kissing her too close to her mouth. “Good to see you.” And for once, she’s glad to see him. The summer sister and the summer brother. Daniel holds her by the shoulders and plants a cool kiss near her ear. “How are you, Vix?” It’s driving her crazy, all these condolences. She can’t stand the idea of them thinking she’s been betrayed. It’s important to set the record

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused exclusively on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion. This has weakened their critique, because fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend. But the “new atheists” command a wide readership, not only in secular Europe but even in the more conventionally religious United States. The popularity of their books suggests that many people are bewildered and even angered by the God concept they have inherited. It is a pity that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris express themselves so intemperately, because some of their criticisms are valid. Religious people have indeed committed atrocities and crimes, and the fundamentalist theology the new atheists attack is indeed “unskillful,” as the Buddhists would say. But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology. In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence. In our talkative and highly opinionated society, however, we seem to have lost sight of this important tradition that could solve many of our current religious problems. I have no intention of attacking anybody’s sincerely held beliefs. Many thousands of people find that the symbolism of the modern God works well for them: backed up by inspiring rituals and the discipline of living in a vibrant community, it has given them a sense of transcendent meaning. All the world faiths insist that true spirituality must be expressed consistently in practical compassion, the ability to feel with the other. If a conventional idea of God inspires empathy and respect for all others, it is doing its job. But the modern God is only one of the many theologies that developed during the three-thousand-year history of monotheism. Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word. I am concerned that many people are confused about the nature of religious truth, a perplexity exacerbated by the contentious nature of so much religious discussion at the moment. My aim in this book is simply to bring something fresh to the table. I can sympathize with the irritation of the new atheists, because, as I have explained in my memoir The Spiral Staircase, for many years I myself wanted nothing whatsoever to do with religion and some of my first books definitely tended to the Dawkinsesque.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I cannot tell you them in the correct order - I am not that learned - but I will mention them as they come to me. I will not be able to put them in their proper categories, of course. Let me see. There is red clay known as Armenian clay, although it does not come from Armenia. There are green verdigris and white borax. Then there are the various vessels that we use for our distillation and purification, some made of clay and some made of glass. We have flasks and retorts, phials and tubes, crucibles and alembics. There is no need to mention all of them. They were expensive enough, but they were all useless. Have I mentioned the red waters or the gallstones of a bull? Then there is sal ammoniac. And the arsenic. And the brimstone. Do you find it confusing? I could go on all day about the various herbs we use. There is agrimony, which smells so sweet; there is valerian, and there is moonwort. So we toiled over the coals and crucibles all day and all night, with the lamps burning around us. The furnace was at full blast, and we heated the liquids to their various boiling points. We used unslaked lime as a caustic, as well as chalk and the whites of eggs; we had powder ground out of ashes and dog shit, piss and clay; we made fires out of wood and out of charcoal; we sprinkled purified salt and vitriol, and then mixed in alum and brewer’s yeast, the hairs of men and of horses, the grease of a sow and the sweat of a red-haired child. Sometimes the amalgam turned yellow, and sometimes silver white. We would fuse and ferment, diffuse and distil. Let me explain to you the nature of the four spirits and the seven bodies, as my master taught them to me. The first spirit is mercury or quicksilver and the second is orpiment of golden hue; the third spirit is sal ammoniac, the moisture of volcanoes, and the fourth is brimstone. The seven bodies are as follows. The sun is gold, and silver is the moon; Mars is iron and Mercury, of course, is quicksilver; Saturn is lead and Jupiter is tin. The seventh, Venus herself, is copper. Whoever practises this cursed art is doomed to failure and ruin. He will sell all his goods and come to no good. There can be no doubt that he will lose everything. So come forward, budding alchemists, and try your luck. If you have money to burn, then stoke up the chemical fires. Do you think that it is an easy craft to learn? Not so. You can be a priest or canon, monk or friar - I promise that you will not have scholarship enough. You can study all the texts, night and day, and still go nowhere. The mystery is too deep. For a layman, it is impossible to unravel.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Anaximander (610–556) took another approach. He believed that the naturalist must go beyond sense data and look for an arche that was entirely different from any of the beings we know. The cosmos must have emerged from a larger entity that contained all subsequent beings in embryo. He called it the apeiron, the “indefinite,” because it had no qualities of its own and was, therefore, indefinable. It was infinite, divine (but not a mere god), and the source of all life. By means of a process that Anaximander was unable to explain satisfactorily, individual beings had “separated out” from the apeiron. A seed had broken away and grown into a cold, damp mass that became the earth. Then, like a tree shedding its bark, the apeiron had sloughed off rings of fire, each surrounded by thick mist, which had encircled the earth. Without empirical proof, this was little more than fantasy, but Anaximander understood that the scientist could throw light on the unknown only if he laid aside conventional modes of thought. When Miletus was conquered by the Persians at the end of the sixth century, the scientific capital moved to Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Here Parmenides developed a radical skepticism. How could we know that the way we analyzed the cosmos bore any relation to the reality itself?5 Were the laws and phenomena that we thought we observed real and objective, or did they merely explain the few aspects of the world that we were able to see? Parmenides became convinced that to attain the truth, human reason must rise above common sense and unverified opinion. The idea of change, for example, was pure convention. The Milesians had been wrong to imagine that the world had developed gradually. Reality consisted of a unified, single, complete, and eternal being. It might appear that creatures came into being and passed away, but true reality was unaffected by time. A rational person should not speak of things that did not exist, so we should never say that something had been born, because that implied that there had been a time when it did not exist; for the same reason, we must not say that something had died or moved or changed. But how could one function in such a world? What were we to make of the physical changes we noted in our bodies? How could you say anything without mentioning past or future? One of Parmenides’ disciples was a commander in the navy: How could he guide a ship that was not supposed to move?

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Daughter, cast off your melancholy. The gods have decreed, and by eternal oath confirmed, that you must be wedded to one of these two noble knights who have suffered so much on your behalf. I may not tell you which of them. But one of them will be your lawful husband. Farewell. I must leave you now. But I can tell you this. The fires now burning on my altar have been a sign to you. You have seen your destiny.’ Then the figure of Diana vanished, with the rattling of her arrows in the quiver. Emily was amazed at this sudden vision. ‘I do not know what the goddess meant,’ she said. ‘But, Diana, I put myself under your protection. Dispose of me as you will.’ Thereupon she left the holy place and returned to the palace. There I will leave her. The hour after this, in the planetary hour of Mars, Arcite walked to the temple of the god where he would make his sacrifice. He performed all of the sacred rites and then, with passion and devotion, he prayed to the god of battle.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So they walked back to the mill, leading their horse along the way. The miller was sitting by the fire. It was pitch black outside now, and they could travel no further. So they asked him to provide them with food and lodging for the night. They offered to pay, of course. ‘If there be any room in my poor dwelling,’ the miller said, ‘then you shall have it. My house is small but you scholars know how to argue and dispute. You can prove anything with your rhetoric. See if you can prove that twenty square feet of space equals a square mile.’ ‘Well, Simkin,’ John replied, ‘that’s a fair comment. I divn’t kna’ how to answer you. There’s a sayin’ up north - that a man has only two options. He can tek things as he finds them, or bring things of his own. But to be honest with you, Simkin, we’re knackered and hungry. We need food and drink. Bring us some bread and meat - or anythin’ - and we’re happy to pay for them. Look. I’ve got silver here. I kna’ that the hawk will not fly to an empty hand.’ So the miller sent his daughter into town to buy bread and beer. He roasted them a goose, too. And he made sure that the horse was tethered so that it would not escape again. Then he made up a bed for them in his own chamber, complete with clean sheets and blankets. It was only ten feet away from his own bed, but where else could John and Alan lie? There was no other room available. But this is the interesting point - the bed of his daughter was also in the same chamber. So the miller and his guests ate and drank and talked and drank, until about midnight. Then they went up to their beds. The miller himself was by this time very drunk; his bald head was as red as a beetroot. And then at the next moment he had gone pale, as if he were about to vomit. He was sweating and belching, his voice croaking as if he had a bad cold or a fit of asthma. His wife had got into bed with him. She was also very far gone, but she was jolly and giggling. Their baby was in a cradle at the end of their bed, so that he could be easily rocked or given the teat. When they had drained the last drop of drink, it was time for sleep. The young daughter got beneath the sheets. So did Alan and John. What do you think happened next?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Scientific rationalism consists largely of problem solving, an approach that does lead to systematic advance: after a problem has been solved, it can be laid aside and scientists can move on to tackle the next. But the humanities do not function in this way, because the problems they confront, such as mortality, grief, evil, or the nature of happiness, are not capable of a once-and-for-all solution. It can take a lifetime’s engagement with a poem before it reveals its full depth. This type of contemplation may function differently from ratiocination, but it is not for that reason irrational; it is like the “thinking” Heidegger prescribed: repetitive, incremental, and receptive.68 The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, “something met which bars my passage” and “is before me in its entirety,” and a mystery, “something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety.”69 We have to remove a problem before we can proceed, but we are compelled to participate in a mystery—rather as the Greeks flung themselves into the rites of Eleusis and grappled with their mortality. “A mystery is something in which I am myself involved,” Marcel continued, “and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its essential validity.”70 It is always possible—and perhaps a modern temptation—to turn a mystery into a problem and try to solve it by applying the appropriate technique. It is significant that today a detective story based on such problem solving is popularly known as a “mystery.” But for Marcel this is a “fundamentally vicious proceeding” that could be symptomatic of a “corruption of the intelligence.”71 Philosophers and scientists were beginning to return to a more apophatic approach to knowledge. But the tradition of Denys, Thomas, and Eckhart had been so submerged during the modern period that most religious congregations were unaware of it. They tended still to think about God in the modern way, as an objective reality, “out there,” that could be categorized like any other being. During the 1950s, for example, I learned by heart this answer to the question “What is God?” in the Roman Catholic catechism: “God is the supreme spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Denys, Anselm, and Aquinas were probably turning in their graves. The catechism had no hesitation in asserting that it was possible simply to draw breath and define, a word that literally means “to set limits upon,” a transcendent reality that must exceed all words and concepts.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin, naturalist on board the HMS Beagle, had embarked on a five-year scientific survey of South American waters to study the flora, fauna, and geology of Tenerife, the Cape Verde Islands, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania, and finally the Keeling (Cocos) Islands. The evidence he gathered forced him to deny Paley’s argument from design. God had certainly not created the world exactly as we knew it. Instead, it seemed clear that the species had evolved slowly over time, as they adapted to their immediate environment. During this process of natural selection innumerable species had indeed perished. In November 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Later, in The Descent of Man (1871), he suggested even more controversially that Homo sapiens had developed from the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they had evolved by trial and error, and God had had no direct hand in their making. The evolutionary hypothesis shattered so many fundamental preconceptions that initially few could absorb it in its entirety. Even Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had made a significant contribution to Darwin’s work, could not accept the lack of a controlling Intelligence.40 The American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), a convinced evolutionist as well as a dedicated Christian, used the evolutionary hypothesis in his study of plant life but could not accept the absence of an overall divine plan.41 Darwinian theory not only undermined the design-based theology that had become the mainstay of Western Christian belief, but repudiated central principles of the Enlightenment.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  There is no selfhood in the Trinity.46 Instead there is silence and kenosis. The Father, the ground of being, empties itself of all that it is and transmits it to the Son, giving up everything, even the possibility of expressing itself in another Word. Once that Word has been spoken, the Father no longer has an “I” and remains forever silent and unknowable. There is nothing that we can say about the Father, since the only God we know is the Son. At the very source of being is the speechless “nothingness” of Brahman, Dao, and Nirvana, because the Father is not another being and resembles nothing in our mundane experience. The Father confounds all our notions of personality and, since the Father is presented in the New Testament as the end of the Christian quest, this becomes a journey to no place, no thing, and no one. In the same way, the Son, our only access to the divine, is merely an eikon of the ultimate reality, which remains, as the Upanishads insisted, “ungraspable.” Like any symbol, the Son points beyond itself to the Father, while the Spirit is simply the atman of the Father and the “we” between Father and Son. We cannot pray to the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included. The Christians of Western Europe arrived at a similar understanding of the Trinity by a more psychological route, charted by Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa.47 Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine had experienced a restless dissatisfaction that drove him from one philosophia to another. He tried materialism, hedonism, and Manichaeism (a Gnostic Christian sect) before he discovered Neoplatonism, which burst upon him, he recalled later, in a blaze of light and saved him from despair. Like his contemporaries, Augustine was appalled by the instability of the material world, which seemed to tremble on the brink of nothingness. At first he fought shy of Christianity. He found the idea of the incarnation offensive and was disappointed by the literary quality of the Bible. But his reading of Paul and the counsel of Ambrose, the saintly bishop of Milan (339–97), led to a dramatic conversion when “the light of steadfast trust poured into my heart, and all the shadows of hesitation fled away.”48 Apart from Saint Paul, no other Western theologian has been more influential than Augustine in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity. We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity because of his Confessions, a memoir that revealed his fascination with the working of the human mind that is also evident in his treatise On the Trinity. Augustine fully understood the implications of the new creation doctrine that had rendered God unknowable. In one of the most famous passages of The Confessions, he made it clear that the study of the natural world could not give us information about God:

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The fourth via is a moral argument derived from Aristotle: some things are better, truer, and more exalted than others, and this hierarchy of excellence presupposes an unseen perfection that is best of all. The fifth proof is drawn from Aristotle’s belief that everything in the universe has a “Final Cause” that is the “form” of its being. Everything obeys natural laws to attain its proper end and purpose, and the regularity of these laws cannot be accidental. They must be directed “by someone with awareness and understanding,” just as the flight of an arrow presupposes an archer—and that “someone is what we call God.” Thomas was not trying to convince a skeptic of God’s existence. He was simply trying to find a rational answer to the primordial question: Why does something exist rather than nothing? All the five “ways” argue in one way or another that nothing can come from nothing. 36 At the conclusion of each proof, Thomas rounds the argument off with a variant on the phrase quod omnes dicunt Deum: the Prime Mover, the Efficient Cause, the Necessary Being, the Highest Excellence, and the Intelligent Overseer are “what all people call God.” It sounds as though everything is done and dusted, but no sooner has Thomas apparently settled the matter than he pulls the rug from under our feet. He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that “what we call God” (a reality that we cannot define) must “exist,” we have no idea what the word “exists” can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this really means. 37 The same goes for God’s attributes. God is Simplicity itself; that means that, unlike all the beings of our experience, “God is not made up of parts.” A man, for example, is a composite being: he has a body and soul, flesh, bones, and skin. He has qualities: he is good, kind, fat, and tall. But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he is goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently” of an individual instance of it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But they found conventional religious life bewildering. For decades the Iberian Jews had lived without communal religious life and had no experience of ritual observance. The Dutch rabbis had the difficult task of guiding them back into the fold, making allowances for their problems without compromising tradition, and it is a tribute to them that most of the Marranos were able to make the transition. 86 But initially their reaction was similar to that of people today who find the “beliefs” of religion arbitrary and incredible because they have not fully participated in its transformative rites. The abstruse laws of diet and purification must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the Marrano sophisticates, who found it difficult to accept the rabbis’ explanations because they were used to thinking things out rationally for themselves. According to Isaac Orobio de Castro, a philosophy professor who had lived in Iberia for years as a closet Jew, some of them had become “unspeakable atheists”: 87 they were “full of vanity, pride and arrogance,” loved to display their learning “by contradicting what they do not understand,” and felt that their expertise in the modern sciences put them above “those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws.” 88 A tiny minority of the Marranos found the transition to full cultic observance impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had experienced Portuguese Christianity as oppressive, cruel, and composed of rules and doctrines that bore no relation to the gospels. 89 He had formed his own idea of Jewish religion by reading the Bible, but when he arrived in Amsterdam he was shocked to find that contemporary Judaism was just as far removed from scripture as Catholicism. Outraged, he published a treatise attacking the Torah and declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. He caused such ferment that the rabbis were forced to excommunicate him. There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street. In despair, he returned to the synagogue, but he still could not adapt to a faith that seemed incomprehensible. In 1640, he committed suicide. In 1655 Juan da Prado, who had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, arrived in Amsterdam. He too had found that without the spiritual exercises that produced them, the ideas of conventional religion lacked substance and had succumbed to Marrano deism, seeing God as identical with the laws of nature.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty. Hume and Kant had cast doubt on this ideal by suggesting that our understanding of the external world was merely a reflection of human psychology. But even Kant believed that the fundamental categories of Newtonian science—space, time, substance, and causality—were beyond question. Yet within a generation of Hilbert’s confident prediction that all physicists had to do was add the final touches to Newton’s great “Systeme,” it had been superseded. Already in the late nineteenth century, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) had developed the theory of electromagnetic radiation, showing that physicists were beginning to understand time quite differently from the way we experience it, since a radio wave could be received before it had been sent. The puzzling experiments on ether drift and the speed of light conducted by the American scientists Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923) suggested that the relative velocities of light from the sun were the same in the direction of the earth’s rotation as when opposed to it, which was entirely inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics. There followed the discovery of radioactivity by Alexander-Edmond Becquerel (1820–91) and the isolation of quantum phenomena by Max Planck (1858–1947). Finally, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) applied Planck’s quantum theory to light, and formulated his theories of special (1905) and general (1916) relativity. Relativity was able to accommodate the Michelson-Morley findings by merging the concepts of space and time, regarded as absolutes by Newton, into a space-time continuum. Building on Einstein’s breakthrough, Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics. So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally, as each generation improved on the discoveries of its forebears. In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics, three-dimensional space and unidimensional time had become relative aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Atoms were not the solid, indestructible building blocks of nature but were found to be largely empty. Time passed at different rates for observers traveling at different speeds: it could go backward or even stop entirely. Euclid’s geometrical laws no longer provided the universal and necessary structure of nature. The planets did not move in their orbits because they were drawn to the sun by gravitational force operating at a distance but because the space in which they moved was actually curved. Subatomic phenomena were particularly baffling because they could be observed as both waves and particles of energy. “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed me,” Einstein recalled. “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.”1

• From The Case for God (2009)

  All our knowledge was, therefore, inescapably subjective, because it was shaped and determined by human psychology. Our metaphysics was pure fantasy, and the so-called natural laws merely reflected a human prejudice. The “proofs” for God’s existence should be greeted with profound skepticism. Science, which was based on observation and experiment, could give us no information about God, one way or the other. But Hume had gone too far. Violating fundamental scientific and religious presuppositions, he seemed to invalidate the entire scientific enterprise that was now essential to the way people thought. Dismissed as a mischievous eccentric, he found few disciples in his lifetime. Other eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers opposed him by claiming that truth was indeed objective and available to any human being of sound “common sense.” Some thirty years later, however, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) read Hume and felt as though he had been roused from a dogmatic slumber. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he agreed that our understanding of the natural world was deeply conditioned by the structure of our minds and that it was impossible to achieve any knowledge of the reality we call God, which lay beyond the reach of the senses. We could neither prove nor disprove God’s existence, because we had no reliable means of verification. Even though Kant regarded the Enlightenment as a liberating movement, his philosophy in effect imprisoned people within their own subjective thought processes. But Kant agreed that it was natural for human beings to have ideas that exceeded the grasp of their minds. He once reassured his servant that he had “only destroyed dogma to make room for faith,” 59 and yet he had no time for the rituals and symbols of religion that made faith viable. On August 8, 1802, Napoleon visited Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), the leading physicist of his generation. 60 A protege of d’Alembert and an admirer of Kant, Laplace shared their modest assessment of the powers of human reason. When discussing scientific matters, he did not mention God at all—not because he was hostile to religion but because he saw God as irrelevant to physics. This indifference to faith was a new departure: the pioneering scientists of early modernity—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton —had all been deeply preoccupied with faith, and some had found God essential to their science. But when he developed his “nebular hypothesis,” Laplace showed how fatally easy it would be to oust God as the ultimate explanation. In a note added to later editions of his popular Exposition du système du monde (1796), he suggested that the solar system had been produced by a gaseous cloud that covered the sun and condensed to form the planets; the mechanical laws of nature did the rest.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But there is more. In chapter 16, Jesus declares that when the “helper” comes, the “spirit of truth” of whom he has been speaking, this Spirit will have an extraordinary, complex, and dangerous-sounding task to perform. The Spirit, says Jesus, “will prove the world to be in the wrong on three counts: sin, justice, and judgment” (16:8). Jesus goes on to explain each of these—though the explanations themselves will leave many readers today equally puzzled by the dense, almost cryptic way he says it: “In relation to sin—because they don’t believe in me. In relation to justice—because I’m going to the father, and you won’t see me anymore. In relation to judgment—because the ruler of this world is judged.” (16:9–11) We can perhaps add our own brief further explanations. First, the world (which includes, tragically, most of Jesus’s fellow Jews at the time) doesn’t believe in Jesus. It is therefore heading off on the wrong track, missing the mark. The technical term for that is “sin.” Second, Jesus is going to be vindicated, dramatically proven to be in the right. This will be God’s great act of “justice,” putting everything right and so showing up the injustice, the not putting right or the active putting wrong, of the rest of the world. The world, in other words, is deeply and radically out of joint, with all sorts of things going wrong; God will put it all right. Third, God will pass a sentence of condemnation on the “ruler of this world” (“judgment”). How will all this happen? Through the work of the Spirit, whom Jesus is promising to send to his disciples. In other words, it will happen through the Spirit-led work of Jesus’s followers. This is another place where the third speaker is heard (the story of God’s renewed people), its music balancing the fourth one to which we are currently paying attention. John is telling the story of Jesus in such a way as to show how its implicit confrontation between God’s kingdom and Caesar’s kingdom (speaker four) will be played out in the explicit life and witness of Jesus’s followers (speaker three). These are vital strands of what John is doing throughout his gospel. When, after the final prayer (chap. 17) and the arrest and the Jewish trial (18:1–27), we find Jesus standing before Pilate (18:28–19:16), we ought to know, because John has set it up, what is actually going on. This is the point at which the ruler of the world is being judged. Caesar’s kingdom will do what Caesar’s kingdom always does, but this time God’s kingdom will win the decisive victory. Jesus explains (18:36) that his kingdom is not the sort that grows in this world. His kingdom is certainly for this world, but it isn’t from it. It comes from somewhere else—in other words, from above, from heaven, from God. It is God’s gift to his world, but, as John already pointed out in the prologue, the world isn’t ready for this gift.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  It was as though I were lying at the top of the tank, naked and smelling, too intimate an experience to share with my father. I remembered how her tail had already begun disintegrating, and a tiny piece of it had detached and was floating next to her. This is what his flippers looked like. Then something turned in my eye, or the eye of my mind, like when you look at one of those psychedelic posters that can be seen two ways. For a while you look at something one way, but then, all of a sudden, the image flips. Once you see the second way you can’t go back to the first. What I saw was that this was no wet suit at all, but somehow a massive, slimy, heavy tail. It was literally connected to his body. Maybe it was his body? Underneath the cloth were what I assumed might be genitals, then, if he had them? And just below that was an area where the tail, or whatever this was, met his skin. It did not meet in a straight line like the top of a pair of pants, but blended gradually. First there was an area that was mostly skin with a peppering of black scales, like one or multiple birthmarks. From there the scales became more raised, almost like moles or lesions. They began to cluster closer together until they became a solid mass, like rubber or the thick skin of a fish. It looked like time happening, like a wave gradually rolling up on the sand. It was as though whatever this was had happened over time, like some kind of infection—gradually taking over his body. Except this wasn’t an infection. It was like he was part fish. “Are you grossed out?” he asked. “No,” I said. What the fuck was this? Was Theo a mermaid? “Freaked out?” “No. Just shocked and wondering if I’m crazy. How did this happen?” “I was born this way,” he said. “I am what you are thinking I am. Sort of.” “What do you think I think you are?” “A merman.” “Yeah,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I was thinking that.” “I don’t call myself that. None of us think we are that. But to humans we are that.” “Holy shit,” I said. “This is fucking crazy. So, like, there actually are mer-people? And Sirens?” “Sort of. But not the way you conceive of us. Well, we are sort of the way you conceive of us. I mean, obviously I’m very sexy.” He laughed. “You are!” I said. “Ha, not really. But I mean, we aren’t like the Siren myths and stuff. It’s not like we are trying to kill humans or keep them imprisoned on an island. We aren’t like the way they are in The Odyssey . Homer slandered us. But we do live a long, long time. Youthfully. Hundreds of years.